• Kirstie Méheux, Dale Dominey-Howes, and Kate Lloyd.
• Australian Tsunami Research Centre and Natural Hazards Research Laboratory, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia. kirstiemeheux@hotmail.com
• Disasters. 2010 Oct 1; 34 (4): 1102-22.

AbstractCommunity participation is becoming increasingly popular within the field of disaster management. International disaster policies, frameworks and charters embrace the notion that communities should play an active role in initiatives to identify vulnerabilities and risks and to mitigate those dangers, and, in the event of a disaster, that they should play a proactive part in response and recovery (see, for example, UNISDR, 1994; The Sphere Project, 2004; United Nations, 2005). A number of studies have investigated the participation of communities in disaster preparedness and mitigation efforts (see, for instance, Scott-Villiers, 2000; Andharia, 2002; Godschalk, Brody and Burby, 2003), There is, however, limited reflection on the challenges to ensuring participation in the operational context of disaster response. This paper draws on a study of the policy and practice of participatory damage assessment in Fiji to identify and discuss the barriers to formal implementation of community participation in a post-disaster context.© 2010 The Author(s). Journal compilation © Overseas Development Institute, 2010.

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